While Pat Fenlon and his players attempted to pick themselves up yesterday and start their preparations for Saturday night's FAI cup replay in Derry, Shelbourne's money men were still hoping the club's adventure in Europe this season might provide them with at least one more big payday.
Having been eliminated from the Champions League, the Dubliners now revert to the UEFA Cup, and tomorrow's third-round draw in Monaco could hand them another money-spinning clash with one of the game's giants or less lucrative opposition who might be beaten, thereby providing the Irish club with a place in the group stages of Europe's second competition.
"My view is that we have a dilemma really," said club chairman Finbarr Flood before leaving Spain yesterday. "We want either a big club that might provide us with another financial windfall or a weak one that could maybe be beaten. My gut feeling is that I'd prefer to see us giving it a go against a Newcastle, Roma or Atletico Madrid because you could get one of the less attractive sides and still get beaten."
Even the group stages of the UEFA Cup would bring much more modest returns than a place in the corresponding phase of the Champions League but the additional games would certainly help with the development of the team. Flood, though, believes every game at this level is a step in the right direction and that Tuesday night's defeat by Deportivo will stand to the players when their next chance comes.
"Obviously it was disappointing to lose it 3-0 in the end, 2-0 or even 2-1 would have been far better from our point of view. But you have to say the players did very well; to keep a team like Deportivo scoreless for 150 minutes is an achievement in itself.
"For them (the Spaniards) it was a major fright. They would have all sorts of commercial deals that would be dependent on making the group stages . . . and at half-time they still didn't know whether the deals were going to happen. I was sitting beside their president and there's no doubt that he was sweating.
"The pity of it is that the first goal was a bad one to give away and then the lads lost their composure a little bit. If Jason Byrne could have taken either of the chances that came his way then it might have been very different. Even the lob late on would have put an awful lot of pressure back on them if it had gone in."
The differences in scale off the field - turnover at Deportivo is 40 times as big and the wage bill is 30 times as big - make the gap on it extremely hard for a club like Shelbourne to close unless, as Flood puts it, "people are willing to invest in the potential we possess".
"The hope is," he says, "that people have been able to see that potential in these games. It would have been said that an Irish club getting to the group stages could simply never be done but there we were, 30 minutes away from immortality. What we have to do now is persuade people that we can do even better than this with the right backing."
An additional problem, he says, is that the proliferation of Dublin clubs deprives Shelbourne of serious backing from local government. "What we see everywhere we go is that the successful clubs get huge assistance from their municipalities. Deportivo have an open-ended lease on their stadium but they don't have to worry about owning it. The city also help them and a lot of other clubs with training facilities. That's the sort of thing you can look for when you're going out there and flying the flag for the city year after year.
"For us it's more complicated because there are five or six clubs in Dublin. Now at home that's a good thing because the bigger gates we get are all from the Dublin derbies but when you're trying to make an impact in Europe then clearly it's a handicap. We know we have to keep investing in it, though, because otherwise we have no chance of making further progress."
Meanwhile, Pat Fenlon is likely to be banned from the dugout for Shelbourne's remaining games in Europe this season after being sent to the stand during Tuesday's game only to approach the match official at the final whistle to remonstrate with him again.
Yesterday he continued to defend his actions, insisting he had merely sought to bring Juan Valeron's "diving" to the attention of the referee.
"I shouldn't have been sent off in the first place," he said. "And at the end I was only trying to point out to the referee that (Javier) Irureta (the Deportivo coach) had been ranting and raving all night without anything happening to him. If I have to sit in the stand for a couple of games, though, it wouldn't be the end of the world."
